Some of the tools and implements at Otis' place are similar to those he used 70 years ago. He found many of them around his childhood homes in northeast Kansas.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he helped his Dad train young horses pulling a single-row wheel curler just like one lined up in a row of horse-powered implements. He remembers that when the horses approached a little standing water on a cool spring day, they would try to jump over it, jerking Otis and the curler off the ground and creating havoc.
"I just hated that thing," he recalls.
"It's all you need to build a house," Otis says.
He has two horse-powered well diggers.
There's a wild contraption nearby with room for six horses to push a grain header. The driver, Otis points out, rode behind the pushing horses on a 20-foot boom culminating in a tractor seat riding on a "crazy wheel." A four-horse Van Brundt grain drill is an impressive machine, as is the horse-powered road grader. If Otis has a specialty, it might be horse-powered stationary machines. He comes by that interest honestly. Before he was born, his parents moved their first house four miles using a horse-powered winch. Yes, he has one of those, too.
There are a couple of corn shockers, each equipped with two seats, one for the driver and one for the person tying the shocked corn in bundles. Horse-drawn hay balers provide a reminder of just how slow and difficult farmwork could be before the power of steam and fossil fuels was harnessed.
He has cast iron walking plows more than 150 years old, some of them fully restored. His 1877 miter saw was built by the same Stanley company which is still famous for its tools today. A horse-powered beet seeder from the 19th century was built by the Deere company.
In the sheds are mind-boggling varieties of tools, from a 19th-century blacksmith's trip-hammer mounted on an oak beam to a decades-old version of the all-in-one tool that includes a brace-and-bit, a screwdriver and a monkey wrench. Dozens of antique traps line the walls. He has specialized wrenches and blacksmith's tools of every shape and size, plus a cornucopia of stock-related accessories from bull-blinders to a whipple tree.